North Korea seeks Japan's help in talks with U.S.

Pyongyang (Reuters): North Korea sought Japan's help on Monday to kick-start long-stalled talks with the United States and Japan said it would urge the United States to open dialog with the North, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said.

North Korea's rare request for diplomatic help from Japan came on the same day old foes North Korea and Japan ended their highest-level talks in two years and agreed to consider more talks aimed at normalizing ties.

But no headway was made on key obstacles that have blocked the normalization of ties, including the thorny issue of Japanese citizens that Japan says were abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.

"There was no progress on specific and individual issues," said Hitoshi Tanaka, director-general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceania Affairs Bureau.

Japanese officials had stressed from the start that the meeting was unlikely to yield any dramatic breakthrough.

The communist North is under pressure to improve relations with the outside world, which has raised hopes in Japan that progress could be made.

The North Korean request followed efforts by the North and the United States to restart rapprochement efforts, stalled since U.S. President George W. Bush said in January North Korea was part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq.

"It is our stance that we want to resolve problems through dialog," a Japanese Foreign Ministry official quoted North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok-ju as telling the Japanese delegation.

"When Japan holds talks with the United States we would like you to explain our position," Kang was quoted as saying. Kang met Japanese Foreign Ministry officials after they ended two days of talks with their North Korean counterparts.

Kang's comments came ahead of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's visit to Japan from Tuesday, while the U.S. State Department's top arms control negotiator, John Bolton, was in the region.

Undersecretary of State Bolton has a hawkish reputation and The Washington Times newspaper reported that one draft of a speech planned for this week repeats Bush's "axis of evil" line.

The United States had said it would wait for the outcome of the talks between Japan and North Korea before deciding whether to send a delegation to North Korea.

The U.S. stance toward North Korea has been in the spotlight since Secretary of State Colin Powell became only the second U.S. cabinet member in history to meet a North Korean counterpart on July 31, during an Asia-Pacific conference in Brunei.

North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun declared after that encounter that a postponed visit to Pyongyang by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly would go ahead, but U.S. officials made clear that they thought he had jumped the gun.